The Role of Language Specificity in Sparking Controversy on Social Media

Overview

The way information is expressed plays a role in the feelings it elicits. Because general language represents broad concepts and specific language narrows claims, I hypothesized that, in political discussions, general language would communicate positive sentiment with low controversy. For non-political topics, I expected specific language to convey positive sentiment with low controversy. I investigated the sentiment of political and non-political posts on social media that used query words organized into 20 lexical hierarchies, ranging from specific to general. I retrieved 11,725 posts from X.com and used an Al model to quantify the sentiment of each post. I used linear regression to predict post sentiment from the hierarchical position of each word. I found that political communication using general language was associated with more positive sentiment, and specific language is preferred for non-political topics. Surprisingly, controversy increased for more preferred language, which may be due to negativity bias.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Behavioral & Social Sciences (Junior Division) · Entry J-03-20

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